Sacks change operation

Earlier this year the Guardian serialised the latest book by the Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks. It is a volume packed with erudition, bringing a Jewish voice to bear on the great questions of our age, from globalisation to terrorism. Entitled The Dignity of Difference, it is a plea for tolerance, argued not in the familiar terms of secular pluralism but rather - and more ambitiously - from the logic of orthodox faith itself. The book won plaudits both here and abroad.

Inside the Jewish community, however, an argument is raging about Professor Sacks's book on a scale unseen in a generation. A clutch of orthodox rabbis have denounced it as heresy. The chorus of disapproval has extended to include the Chief Rabbi's own religious court, which took out an advertisement in the Jewish Chronicle to declare parts of the text "open to an interpretation that is inconsistent with basic Jewish beliefs". Recently, a nonagenarian Jerusalem sage, regarded as orthodoxy's greatest living authority, ruled that Jews were forbidden to have the book in their homes.

At issue is a series of statements that would surely be platitudes in any other context. "In heaven there is truth; on earth there are truths," the Chief Rabbi writes. "No one creed has a monopoly on spiritual truth." His critics have taken exception to the idea that Judaism might not include every truth there is to be known and might instead have something to learn from other faiths.

This is a sad business, for at least three reasons. First, a melancholy irony arises when the people of the book start banning books. Second, it is similarly regrettable that a plea for tolerance between religions should provoke such dissension within one. But, third, there is a particular sadness at what this episode has done for the Chief Rabbi himself.

Far from stoutly defending his stance, he has promised to rewrite the offending passages in a new edition. That has disappointed moderates and hardly pleased enemies who have seized on it as a sign of weakness. There was another way. The incoming Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, has also been accused of heresy by his own hardliners. Far from changing his tune, he says he cannot retract what he has written and that his accusers will have to live with it. Dr Sacks should have done the same: that he has not is a loss to his own community and to a wider society which might have looked to him for a moral lead.